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For one thing, I'm having one heck of a time forming dora milaje with the corresponding meaning of 'adored ones'. As Kehgrehdid mentioned, loanwords are one way to get words with atypical phonotactics into a language. This can be an easy dodge, because if necessary, you can posit that the term was ...

Ooh, I like this. No new morphemes, but adds new levels of meaning possibilities. To give you a glimpse of the future: one common progression you see as conlangers gain more experience is that they start with a very heavy focus on morphology (ways to change the forms of words) and only later begin ...

Oh I'll show you a lengthy reply ;) If a word like "grass" is collective, then the singulative would mean "a blade of grass" or "a piece of grass", right? If so, how would one then go about expressing "blades of grass"?... For that matter, I found quantifiers very challenging, to think of another wa...

Ahh, so the passive/antipassive is markers on the verb itself (I so did not understand that part!) that allows the verbs to change the transitivity (valency?) from transitive to intransitive while still sticking with the rule that a verb has to have a subject. Strictly speaking, only the bold part ...

This language doesn't have so much of a separate world and culture as it's sort of my language, the way I'd like to be able to express myself and just be creative and all that. So I'm choosing features not based on what I think some hypothetical culture would have or what fits with them, but more o...

Again, behaviour was never at issue. Concept and ideology from the (Catholic) Christian perspective was my starting and shall be my ending point with refuting his statement. This is precisely the problem. Behavior was always the issue in Sal's statement. If you interpret it as something else and th...

@elemtilas: Sal isn't arguing what you think he's arguing, hence the confusion. (Please correct me if I've misinterpreted you, Sal.) You made a claim: "Sex is only tangentially and circumstantially related to marriage, which is a way of regulating the transmission of property." I countered: "Actuall...

I agree with cntrational here. A metaphor is an equation of two unlike things in order to highlight their similarities—so "days" contains a very sneaky metaphor, because it says that a stack of two books and a period of 48 hours are in some way the same . And so, The key thing about polysemy, howeve...

nevermind all this, then, and sorry You prompted a whole flurry of interesting discussion and got Sal talking about the philosophy of science, so instead of neverminding I'm inclined to mind my way through the whole thread. For those interested, this thread over on the zbb was a pretty great read; ...

So, there's a lot to unpack here, but I'm pressed for time, so I'm just going to pick some low-hanging fruit. Also, Etihus has zero copula. Last I checked, English does not. Further, Etihus has zero copula regardless of tense (there is no "to be" in Etihus. When I translate back into English, I have...

But people might be able to learn the regular Fith language, as people learn twelve-tone music and all sorts of weirdness all the time. That's highly unlikely. Twelve-tone music is a very different sort of problem; Fith syntax would likely tax working memory and processing beyond what we're able to...

Slight Tangent: Do you think it's possible for a human to make a language that is truly alien in nature, or is it impossible due to our minds being ruled by our very human cognitive processes? Fith did a pretty good job, I think. The premise is that while we can conceive of stack structures (such t...

People take different approaches. Sometimes folks will create a single thread for a project and post about all kinds of topics in it. Threads like this don't have to be nice and ordered, because people tend to post in them with whatever they happen to be working on at the time, or with answers to wh...

"Magic" in my conworld is really a catch-all for a lot of disparate things falling under the umbrella of "this doesn't follow the same rules as normal things", whether that's a creature or a word or an action or a substance or an object or a person or something else. Is there some kind of criteria ...

"I hear you". It seems like a direct object, but "ni" (dative form) rather than "ne" (accusative form) is used because it's really the words that are being heard. This is really just a matter of memorizing a list of verbs that often take a dative object, but they can all be explained semantically (...

Wow, I just looked up Tienzen Gong and now I'm probably going to have to read everything (or at least a lot). This is completely ridiculous... Dude, no. There's so many more productive things you could do with your time. You could learn FORTRAN. Or, like, handwrite a list of all the positive intege...

However, this thread has been very enlightening in terms of finding out the most patient and well meaning of the forum goers in these parts. I think Trailsend should get a medal! [:)] Aww, shucks. :) I don't mean to be a negative Nancy here, but this may just be a case of "you can lead a horse to w...

If there are no verbs to begin with, how do you categorize the MSA? The understanding I got from some people, and the conclusion I was leaning towards, was that MSA doesn't apply to Etihus because Etihus can have arguments that omit verbs completely, and it can have arguments within a single word. ...